Saturday, August 01, 2015

One of my favorite sequences inone of my fave films, Bella Tarr’s Satanstango, concerns the village doctor. We
watch him get drunk in his home, fall down in an apparent stupor, and then get
up – after which comes the sequence, which consists of nothing more than him
walking to the village inn to get more liquor.
The thing about it is, the camera follows him in real time. Since he is
old, obese, and intoxicated, that means that the camera watches him make an at
most quarter mile jog in about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes! When I first
saw this, I couldn’t believe it – I couldn’t believe Tarr would dare an
audience to basically install itself in the speed and sensibility of one of the
members of the slow cohort of the population – those users of walkers, those
hobblers down sidewalks or the aisles of grocery stores, those old or impaired.
Normally, we’d get a bit of slow hobbling and cut then to the doctor
approaching the inn. We’d get in other words what we expect in the terms of the
speedy cohort, the ones with cars, the ones who run, the ones who stride,
walking their dogs, or over the beach, radiating the get it now ethos.

Well, at the moment, I have
fallen out of the speedy cohort. Get it now? I can barely keep up with the
drunken doctor in the flick. My little monster wound, as I affectionately refer
to it, keeps me limited to a stately, or if you like, arthritic pace. Of course,
I’m supposed to sit around the house, or lie around, and mostly I’m obedient,
but it drives me a bit nuts not to be able to go the four blocks up Wilshire to
my usual coffee shop. Of course, I do go a bit – I pick up Adam from his school,
a trip which, in all, is about eight blocks. And I go those blocks slowly.

The doctor in Satanstango lives
in a village where, aside from a few cars and tractors, the fastest things are
dogs and horses. Not a metropole. I live in Santa Monica, which, as in all
American cities, cars are the primary entities. Humans are down on the scale. I
take a grim, slow person’s satisfaction, now, in crossing the street, holding
back that anxious car driver who wants that three seconds – gotta have that
three seconds! And is probably cursing me in his or her driver’s seat. Good. I’ve
discovered that with slowness comes no spiritual insight, but a certain
bitterness, a fuck you attitude. This is evidently not good from the point of
view of the Mahatma and Jesus Christ. But let the Mahatma and Jesus Christ walk
across the street while a black BMW inhabited by somehow who has never missed a
lunch or not gotten what they wanted in their entire fucking life glowers at
them. It is … trying.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Jesus Christ, God, Florence Nightingale, Moses, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the Buddha have all been filmed –or, rather, actors playing these people have all been on film. I thought that only one mortal man was immune from the gaze of the camera – Mohammed – and that because the Saudis tend to crowd source adverse audience reaction, in terms of car burning and rioting, whenever Mohammed’s visage shows up. It’s a serious thumbs down situation.But I was wrong!It turns out that David Foster Wallace – or David fucking Foster Wallace, as I will call him here, since I am being all into that desacralizing thing – should also be immune from the movies. Who knew? His fans normally don’t overturn and burn buses in Islamabad, however, but quietly weep in the pages of the Guardian, The New Republic, and elsewhere. A new film is out that adopts a book of interviews with D(f)FW to the screen. I am not myself a fan of the genre of films about writers, since they tend to portray writers as solitary folks, agonizing out the daily word limit, typing (oh, the typing scenes, which are a whole variety of cringe by themselves!) – basically, the whole reactionary fantasy of the individual creator, and I find that boring, and a little surprising, since writing could be a highly dramatizable subject. However, what interests me is the reaction to the film by people who have known or feel they have some claim on D(f)FW.F’rinstance, this piece in the New Republic, which does a header in piety in the first graf and never looks back:Why I am not watching the David Foster Wallace Movie: he taught me not to by Jason Guriel. It is probably not Guriel’s fault, the title. However, the “he taught me not to” clause has a music to it, does it not? Much like “Jesus loves the little children/all the children of the world”, it has a sort of hymnal for simps feel.This – I kid you not! – is the first graf:“There’s a certain irony in making a feature film about David Foster Wallace: funneling the most voluminous of writers, he of the endnotes with their own gravitational pull, into a work of entertainment. The market, of course, is primed for a multiplex-filling movie. DFW’s fans have already consumed every available DFW product—not just his terrific short stories, or his 900-plus page dystopian novel on TV, tennis, and addiction, Infinite Jest; but also his critical essays, his Kenyon College commencement address, and his gonzo forays into reporting and travel writing. For the completist, there are also hisinterviews with Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky from the Infinite Jestbook tour of 1996—which have now been adapted as The End of the Tour, with Jason Segel playing DFW. But what emerges from those interviews and Wallace’s critical essays is his deep aversion to entertainment.”

To entertainment no less! Such a shame, too, since the multiplexes will surely be filled to the bursting to see a film about a publicity touring writer who wrote a best seller in the 90s. The kids can't get enough of that kind of thing!

Of course, the Hollywood ridiculousness of the intro is there for a reason. After all, there’s no virtue and gold stars in being immune to a temptation that hasn’t been offered to you – the Devil doesn’t ask everybody to bow down and worship him in return for supreme domination of the earth. He knows well enough that most putz’s are willing to bow down to make the fucking next month's auto insurance payment. Only the superhuman are selected by the devil for special visits.

Hence, of course, Wallace.

We know that Guriel is in fantasy land with this vision – if there is box office here, it is strictly due to some celeb comedy actor taking on the role. Period. Surely the editors at TNR know this, as well as knowing that a little name dropping when a movie is coming along can't do any harm.

But that's show business. What bugs me is the jawdropping idea that D(f)FW was somehow “averse” to entertainment, and taught his disciples such. This tickles. This makes me break out into deep braying sounds, like a donkey going down.

Averse to entertainment? I wonder what the secret teachings are about masturbation and dental hygiene?

In fact, D(f)FW was in the entertainment business, which is a business that thrives on the kind of logrolling that makes for articles about the “controversy” concerning this or that bit of pop flotsam. He wrote his books to have them published, and he was more than willing to flog them. Which puts him up there with everybody else in the industry.

Now, it is true that entertainment has very often been treated as something other than art. Baseball and comic strips are the entertainment, Ulysses and the Rothko Chapel are the art, or so goes this dogtired move in a game that started when the grand old patrons were guillotined in the 18th century and their land was confiscated, and the new patrons of the nineteenth century, tycoons all, contented themselves mostly with collecting what the older patrons of the Church and Nobility used to commission. Bastards. Since that time, the academics have gotten in on the act too; until, some time in the 1970s or 80s, they pressed the division until it collapsed. However, it was always an ad hoc structure, which pressed guild like pretensions upon a recalcitrant capitalist reality.

I don’t think Wallace was a stupid man, so he knew the deal as well as anybody else. He might well have had an aversion to a lot of entertainment – he might not have liked bowling, he might have found gross out comedy stupid, he might not have appreciated the Simpsons in their prime – but I can’t believe he was so deluded as to think that “entertainment” was Verboten.

One of the terrible things about the D(F)FW cult is that it makes me sympathetic to Brett Easton Ellis. Surely, I like to think, I can’t sink so low! And yet B(f)EE’s bitchery about the Wallace cult seems more and more accurate. At some point, the pap has to stop.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.